Philippa Snow

They call it “Marbs.” Some of them do, anyway—not the real deal money; not 'Tony' and 'Mel' Banderas-Griffiths, whose beach-front palace’s lease, quite tragically, outlived their marriage—but the ones who are there for an earthier breed of bacchanal: the drunks, the San Tropez tanners, the motor-mouthed swimsuit babes, the rutting Croyden bucks—and so on, and so forth. Breasts as buoyant as puppies; pectorals as tight as spinster's mouths: the strip on Puerto Banús is a gorgeou... [more]

Look, here's the thing: under certain circumstances (in a court of law, in matters of dress, in affairs of the heart) I believe in being totally up-front and honest, which is why I believe that I should tell you from the outset that I am absolutely crazy about John Waters. I mean to say: I actually once came very close to having the man's initials permanently tattooed onto my bicep after a meet 'n' greet. That was back, I think, in 2012, when my body was a slightly more worthy vessel to be etched... [more]

Earlier this week, I came across a somewhat striking quotation from a 2007 edition of Tracey Emin's now-defunct column for the Independent newspaper: "faced with the daily prospects of failure and self-loathing,” the artist suggests, “a numb chrysalis starts to develop around you, and if you are not careful you wake up one morning to find yourself not awake, but in a semi-comatose state, baked into a hardened shell, breathless and mind-numbing. You have to poke your finger through th... [more]

There is nothing like going to a trendy event to reinforce the realization that you are a pitiable crone. For those of you who have yet to have this epiphany: it will come. For those of you who have already had it—please, take this leaflet for my support group, and call the number on the reverse. Perhaps the bad back that I find myself troubled with nightly, hunched over and writing to an ever-present deadline, has come from the dizzying fall from fashionable club-kid Valhallah to the mostly-humdr... [more]

In March, Artforum announced that both Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman would be creating new series of work for placement in various international American Embassies; in corporate terms, this is like being asked to make a contribution to the décor of the global headquarters of Brand America, and the announcement is of note to me personally because a) I genuinely enjoy the work of Cindy Sherman, b) I enjoy the aesthetics of Brand America from a largely kitsch perspective, and c) I am now committe... [more]

I have been thinking, for the last week or so, about art and criminality. Not so much about the inherent criminality of the art world, necessarily—whether this dealer or that dealer might also be involved in the arms trade, or ruminating on the more subjective moral brand of “criminality” present in the sale of an eighteen-million-estimate artwork—but the literal "Push me Pull you" relationship which the two “concepts,” have been enacting in my peripheral vision... [more]

The New Year: you feel fattened, you have to go back to work, everything you've just bought is now half the price of what you paid for it, it's cold and bleak. It's also the most depressing time of the year. But fear not: the affliction of New Year's resolutions still prevails over us all, ensuring that we will feel even worse in two weeks when we fail to see any of them through.
Our resident misanthrope Philippa Snow sets herself some imminently doomed challenges for 2015.
1. I will not buy... [more]

This week, Artslant Pin-Ups observes the fact that the birthday of our Lord and Savior the infant Christ is fast approaching, and chooses to share with our readers a totally innocuous artwork, instead of some smut: the lovely and less-than-PG-rated Slightly Open Clam-Shell, by Georgia O'Keeffe. Definitely 100 percent a painting of a clamshell, and nothing else (what's wrong with you, man?), this beautiful, totally non-sexualized and wholesome work from 1926 is a perfect expression of just how litt... [more]

“I really understand wanting to punch art,” I wrote back to my Editor after being asked my opinion on the Andrew Shannon Monet-punching story. “I think about it almost daily.” And I do.
Personally-speaking, I can think of several specific incidents during which I have fantasized about punching an artwork in the last five years alone: at the height of "First Thursdays" mania in East London three or four years ago, for instance, I attended a "hip" show by an artist whose wor... [more]

Selected by London-based writer Philippa Snow, ArtSlant's Page 3 Pin-Ups is an acerbic take on the topless tabloid muse. The new weekly series is inspired by Playboy’s Playmates, Page Three, and Letters To Penthouse: for anyone who’s ever muttered the phrase “fuck contemporary art” and really meant it.
Today’s internet-smashing pin-up is notable for the fact she has everything the modern gentleman wants: an ass that won’t quit, one that Sir Mix-A-Lot (O.B.E.) would love.... [more]

Selected by London-based writer Philippa Snow, ArtSlant's Page 3 Pin-Ups is an acerbic take on the topless tabloid muse. The new weekly series is inspired by Playboy’s Playmates, Page Three, and Letters To Penthouse: for anyone who’s ever muttered the phrase “fuck contemporary art” and really meant it.
Dear Artslant Letters—I never thought the guys and girls who write to you were for real, or that anything like this would ever happen to me, but boy, was I wrong! About three months ago, I was on the banks of the Seine wh... [more]

Selected by London-based writer Philippa Snow, ArtSlant's Page 3 Pin-Ups is an acerbic take on the topless tabloid muse. The new weekly series is inspired by Playboy’s Playmates, Page Three, and Letters To Penthouse: for anyone who’s ever muttered the phrase “fuck contemporary art” and really meant it.
Lovely Leslie, 23, hails from Minnesota: the only daughter of a lumberjack and a shampoo model, this dreamy doozy's lifelong ambition is to follow in both her daddy... [more]

I read recently about a group in the States called The Order of the Good Death, who describe themselves as “a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality,” a mission which seems like both good sense and nonsense in equal measure.
I myself am what I suppose could be labeled death-phobic. The many other things of which I am afraid —mechanical or puppet clowns, ventriloquist's dummies... [more]

Halloween, for me, is the true “most wonderful time of the year,” and so it came as no real surprise to be asked to outline a few costume suggestions for the readers of this website. While most of my own clothes can do double-service as both everyday wear and Hammer-Horror garb alike, I recognize not everyone reading is capable of making the same assertion.
(I should note that when this article was first proposed to me by an Editor, it came with the suggestion that I dress my partner&mdas... [more]

Good evening, art-appreciators! Please pull up a Beuysian chair, with a heap of fat on it, because I have something to ask you:
Had a good Frieze, did you, reader? Drank some complimentary champagne? Saw at least one instance of 'is this art'? Hung out at Selfridges Hotel, in a dress with spaghetti straps? Wore a black smock instead—normcore style? Said the words "art market," and didn't even flinch at how serious you were about it? Listened, once, "ironically," to "Anaconda" by Nicki Minaj a... [more]

Given that I am now older (although no wiser, perhaps) than I was when I was 21, there are very few things which can coax me over to the Camden area these days. To make your first trip back there after you've reached something sort-of-approximating adulthood is like having the lights flicked on, abruptly, in a low rent simu-dive-bar: Soylent Green may be people, but the human skulls on the bar here are made of B-grade plastic, and the candles shoved into them are melting their crania. Its patina... [more]

ArtSlant's resident London critics and lovers Philippa Snow and Thogdin Ripley first met at a William S. Burroughs show. They recently revisited the artist and writer's work in Animals in the Wall at London Newcastle Project Space.
Thogdin Ripley: I'm going to put my cards right here on this table to start with. I've always been a big fan of Burroughs’ writing—he was one of the most inventive writers and at times one of the best, in my opinion—but I've never, never really go... [more]

512 Hours at the Serpentine is notorious already, for two reasons: first, for the fact that the show contains no artwork whatsoever, and second, for the way in which it's inspired hysterical, snaking queues outside the gallery—queues of the kind more typically associated with the stadium gigs of her erstwhile pop-star associates Jay-Z and Lady Gaga. Marina Abramovic's medium is nothing, and as such, her critics would argue that her art is nothing, too. Conversely, her many defenders insist that to m... [more]

It may be important that I admit a bias towards the work of Richard Jackson at the outset of this review; I had the pleasure of interviewing the man for a longform article during the opening of New Paintings less than a month ago, and found him an ideal subject – thoughtful and vital and, above all, thoroughly uninterested in system or censorship. Unlike many of his contemporaries – Paul McCarthy say, or his good friend Bruce Nauman – Jackson has remained more or less outside t... [more]

There are certain words and phrases—certain names, in this instance, but more on that later—which carry enough of their own baggage as to throw the rest of the sentence they're carried by off-course; they're linguistic Trojan horses, derailing any attempt at rational discussion (an anecdotal example of this is a friend of mine who refuses point-blank to speak the word “croissant,” on the grounds that it forces the speaker to contort their face into an angry shape—she refers t... [more]

If pressed, I maintain that the reason I keep up with news about popular culture is that, for me, it adds all-important context to the various forms of "legitimate" art that I take in as a job. Visiting Richard Saltoun’s show of Viennese feminist art (that, specifically speaking, of VALIE EXPORT and Friedl Kubelka) for instance, the phrase "proto-selfies" played continuously in my mind: not a phrase of my own design, but one coined for the exhibition by a writer at Blouin Artinfo. Women these days—famous women, typically, but also the occasional civilian (the much-discussed personal train... [more]

He is the Patron, and he is your King. He is the God of the artworld, even more than Jeff "vacuum-cleaner" Koons, or Richard Prince, with his visions of "Spiritual America": the nubile young female with the movie-star make-up in the U.S.A-grade bubble-bath. You overheard at Trisha's that he once paid a St Martins graduate to drink a bottle of Newport lighter fluid and vomit it up and set it on fire, like a real-life conceptual dragon, and wondered, idly if this was the same St Martins student who vomi... [more]

Let us imagine that we were to hold a costume party where the theme was “artists” – you would undoubtedly get a high volume of Dalis and Frida Kahlos and bald-cap Picassos, yes, but I’d say it was a fairly certain bet that you’d get at least three David Hockneys to boot. What I mean is that Hockney – with his distinctive appearance – is so much a part of the cultural furniture that we can expect to see Hockney-styled shoots in, say, Vogue Hommes Internationa... [more]

Art made for the immediate present can rarely stay present; this is the great curse of being a la mode, part of a zeitgeist or a representative of one's own era. Andy Warhol has been lucky enough to remain more-or-less constantly – well, if not relevant, certainly au courant in his fashionable style – and enduringly popular (in a recent Vanity Fair poll of the greatest living artists, with participants including Richter, Serra and Baldessari, several ballots suggested that Warhol be con... [more]

Warhol, Burroughs and Lynch were – for my teenaged self, at least – the Holy Trinity. I recall one early experiment in “literary fiction,” in particular (describing a maybe-LSD-trip, maybe-cryptozoological-arm-wrestling-match scenario, or some other such stream-of-consciousness rubbish) succeeding in horrifying my teachers, and ripping off Burroughs and Lynch in equal measure. As a matter of fact, I still describe Bill as my favourite writer; I am still entirely fascinated by W... [more]

In the world of television, there is a theory which is commonly referred to as the 'Seinfeld Is Unfunny' trope; put simply, it refers to the retroactive viewing of a thing which, though innovative in its day, seems expected in the modern world. Paradoxically, things fall prey to the Seinfeld Is Unfunny phenomenon precisely because they themselves were the first to carve out the particular style which now renders them passé or wholly predictable in the eyes of the viewer. (The pop-culture... [more]

"I have never met anyone who was shocked by our work, or even talked to anyone who had met anyone who was shocked by it." – Jake Chapman, 2006.
In the Tate's Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, there is a sculpture whose presence may yet provoke the most lapsed of Catholic art-appreciators to sweat from their closed-up stigmata: this life-sized Christ – a quadruple amputee, the stumps of whose limbs (in their raw, textured marble) suggest the interior of some s... [more]

As a person who "looks at art" for a living, there is always the occupational hazard that one or more of your loved ones will become caught in the crossfire; out of desperation to have a partner-in-crime to schlep to a West London gallery and look at the New and the Brave, there is always the chance that a friend, a significant other or an acquaintance will be coerced into looking at, say, a video-artwork of a troll-doll with a talking anus, or a "performance installation" which utilises a series... [more]

The Grayson Perry
Tapestry or embroidery, preferably British-made; the haunting expression of a mining-town nightclub singer doing The Green Green Grass of Home; hunting tweeds and a monocle, and the Billy-Bob™ teeth listed on their website as Megabucks AKA Tombstones; a "Class War" t-shirt; more Burberry than a soap-opera actress with a missing septum. Definitely not a big, babyish candy-pink dress if you are a man – that is Grayson's thing, and he does it best.
The Matthew Sm... [more]

I have been thinking, lately, about the intersections between fashion and art and popular culture, ever since reading what I thought of as a particularly asinine quote from the pop star, Lady Gaga:
"I really love the lyrics to ARTPOP, the title track," she told the gossip blog, Just Jared, when asked which were "the most powerful lyrics" on her latest album. “'We could belong together, ARTPOP.' The words seem really simple but it’s through the creative experiences with my friends t... [more]